


with the next morning sun

by inlovewithnight



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Babyfic, F/M, Genderswap, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-04
Updated: 2010-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-18 05:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	with the next morning sun

Being eighteen is hard enough when it's just...being eighteen. Being eighteen when you're sitting in the hard plastic chairs of an emergency room and a police officer is explaining to you that actually neither of your parents survived the crash, that's just cruel and unusual.

Being eighteen and your parents are dead and _you're now the legal guardian of your little brother_ , that ought to be insult and injury and over the top, except that it means you still have him, you're still together, and that's really the only good thing left in all the world.  
**  
You kind of expect him to act out, rebel, but instead he stays home more, gets better grades, never argues or even rolls his eyes at you.

You sit on the living-room floor in the evenings, leaning back against the couch and passing a bottle of vodka back and forth, watching bad movies until you can't focus on the screen.

If he crawls into bed with you more nights than he doesn't, well, what's wrong with that, all that you have is each other, after all. That's always been true but now it's even more so, sharp and cold as glass.

If more than that starts happening, well, it's not like there's a single other person in all the world to care.  
**  
Being eighteen and head of the family and working at the video store and watching the savings and life-insurance payouts melt like snow is hard enough. Being all of that and pregnant is actually too much to deal with, and so you ignore it, pretend it isn't true, until you can't really hide it anymore and he confronts you one morning.

"Gee?" he says, and you start crying before he even gets to the actual question. Later you can't remember if he ever actually managed to ask it or not. It doesn't matter. You hear it as loudly as a fire alarm, echoing in the space between you, the space that disappears when he wraps his arms around you.  
**  
You start going to the doctor, answering questions with a fifty-fifty mix of truth and lies, giving up the vodka and just watching him drink, instead. You lie together in the bed that used to be your parents', flat on your backs, nothing touching except the sides of your hands.

"What if it's, like, a flipper baby?" he asks one day, and you punch him in the ribs but you start laughing, too. What if it is, then what? Somehow that almost seems like the least of your problems.  
**  
No flippers. She's perfect.

You name her Beth, and the nurse asks you so sweetly if that was your mother's name. It wasn't, you just like the sound of it, but you nod and say yes, it was. You figure you might as well get as comfortable as possible with all of the lying.  
**  
You're a high-school graduate with a baby on your hip and he's a high-school dropout who works the overnight shift at the grocery store and everywhere you go in town people who used to know you look at you both with so much pity it makes you want to spit in their faces. They don't get it. They never will. It's a fucked-up little family but it's yours and it's perfect.

"We should go somewhere else," he says one night, while he's lacing up his shoes to go to work and you're bouncing Beth slowly in your arms in front of the late movie. She mostly sleeps during the day and wants to play all night. That's just like you, just like _both_ of you, so you don't see any reason to discourage it.

"Somewhere else?"

"Somewhere new. Where nobody knows us." He stands up and puts on his jacket, kisses her forehead and your forehead and goes out the door before you can think of an answer.  
**  
It makes so much sense, you can't believe neither of you thought of it before.

You pick a town at random out of the atlas, pack up the car in the middle of the night, start driving and leave the lease to expire and the last rent check to bounce. When you get where you're going, you both have new names, and new histories if anybody asks for them.

Almost nobody does. It's eerie, how easy it turns out to be to coast on everyone's assumptions, and exhilarating at the same time. "Your husband," they say, "your daughter." And you nod and smile and say yes, yes, my wonderful husband, my beautiful daughter, my family.  
**  
Beth gets bigger, prettier, smarter, harder to keep still, and you encourage all of it, because you want to see what she'll become if she's allowed to grow as she chooses, allowed to be a little wild.

Not that there aren't rules in the house. But her self-expression, you think that should be allowed to be free.

He doesn't argue. He never does, not about anything to do with her. He nods and looks at you so seriously and says whatever you think best, Gee, whatever you think we should do.

When you do argue, it's never about the things it seems like maybe it should be, never about the big stuff. It's about who left the window unlocked, why the milk got left out on the counter, seriously would it mean death if the toothpaste was put away instead of sitting out to get dry.

Maybe the big stuff just got settled so long ago, without any words or anything more than feeling, that there just wouldn't be any point.  
**  
The closest you ever come to a fight about something serious is when you tell him you want to go back to school, night classes, study nursing and get a job that pays better and carries some actual benefits. Somehow he tacks a silent question on the end of your statements, an accusation of why hasn't _he_ ever done that, why doesn't he have any ambition?

The fact that those questions never actually crossed your mind is, apparently, immaterial, and for the first time you can remember since before your parents died, he walks out of the house without you knowing where he's going or for how long.

You sit on the couch, as still and expressionless as if you're waiting for a bus, not letting yourself panic because what would be the good of panic, he'll come back or he won't and the idea that he won't is ludicrous. The two of you are all that either of you has—no. No, it's the three of you now, and you all need each other, and he has to come back, the world won't spin on its axis if he doesn't.

He does, around midnight, and he kneels down in front of the couch and rests his head on your lap and you touch the back of his neck, just gently. "I never saw any reason to want anything else," he says, "this is everything," and you tell him that's okay, that's okay, baby, everything's okay.  
**  
Nothing is more charming than watching him carry her around the house under one arm, her screaming and laughing, him going about his business like nothing is unusual at all.

Nothing is more beautiful than when they both fall asleep on the couch and you can stand back in the doorway and watch them and think family, family, family.

Nothing is more bizarrely hilarious than realizing that some day she is going to actually ask why it is that Daddy's nickname for her is Flipper, except possibly imagining how he's going to answer the question.

Time goes by and the edges blur between before and after and here and there until it all blends together and you forget sometimes (most of the time) that there was ever any life other than this.  



End file.
